forgiven, but that his own sins were forgiven. From this time the doctrine of grace was clearly seen by him, His soul passed into its bright light. The confusions. which had rested on the language of Scripture cleared away. "I saw the Scripture in an entirely new light," he says, "and straightway I felt as if I were born anew; it was as if I had found the door of Paradise thrown wide open."

Thus Luther fought his way step by step to the freedom of the Gospel; from hard and painful asceticism to despair of holiness by any such means, and then from the very depth of this despair to the comfort and gladness of a free salvation in Christ, as preached to him by Staupitz and the aged monk. By the end of his stay at Erfurt his Christian convictions were well matured, although he was still far, and for many years after this still far, from seeing their full bearing, and the inevitable conclusions to which they led.

In the year 1507 he was ordained a priest, and in the following year he removed to Wittenberg, where the Elector Frederick of Saxony had recently planted a university, destined to be memorably associated with the reformer. If Erfurt be the cradle of the Reformation, Wittenberg was its seminary and the chief seat of its triumph; and the old Augustine convent there, even more than that at Erfurt, gathers to itself a stirring and glorious, if somewhat less solemn interest.

At first Luther lectured on dialectics and physics, but with little good-will. His heart was already in theology-that theology "which seeks out the kernel. from the nut, and the flour from the wheat, and the marrow from the bones." In 1509 he became a

bachelor of theology, and immediately began lecturing on the Holy Scriptures. His lectures produced a powerful impression by the novelty of their views and the boldness of his advocacy of them. "This monk," remarked the rector of the university," "will puzzle all our doctors, and bring in a new doctrine, and reform the whole Roman Church, for he takes his stand on the writings of the apostles and prophets, and on the word of Jesus Christ." On such truly Protestant ground he already stood, although he called himself after this, and truly enough so far as all practical recognition of his position was concerned, "a most insane Papist."

From lecturing he passed to preaching, although here, as at every step, with a struggle. He had an awful feeling of the responsibility of speaking to the people in God's stead, and it required the urgent remonstrance of Staupitz to make him ascend the pulpit. He began his career as a preacher in the small chapel of the convent, a mean building of wood, thirty feet long and twenty feet broad, decayed and falling to pieces. There for the first time was heard that mighty voice which at length shook the world. His words, Melancthon said, were "born, not on his lips but in his soul;" they sprang from a profoundly awakened feeling of the truth of what he spake, and kindled a corresponding feeling. They moved the hearts of all who heard them, as they had never been moved before; and very soon the creaking and mouldy timbers. of the old edifice were altogether unable to contain the

*Dr Martin Pollich of Metrichstadt.

+ Non nasci in labris sed pectore.

numbers who thronged to hear him. He was invited by the town-council to preach in the parish church, and there his burning words reached a much more general and influential audience.

One important element in the education of the reformer still remains to be mentioned. He was destined to see and study the Papacy in the very centre of its power-in its full-blown magnificence in Rome. In

the year 1510-some say 1511-he went on a mission to this city. What he saw and heard there made an ineffaceable impression on him, although it did not produce any immediate result. "I would not take a hundred thousand florins," he afterwards said, "not to have seen Rome. I have said many masses there, and heard many said, so that I shudder when I think of it. There I heard, among other coarse jests, courtiers laughing at table, and bragging that some said mass and repeated these words over the bread and wine, Panis es, Panis manebis; Vinum es, Vinum manebis." For the time, however, the fervour of his monastic devotion. burned bright amid all this blasphemy. He ran the round of all the churches, and believed all the lying legends repeated to him. It even passed through his mind as a regret that his parents were still living, as otherwise he might have wrought their deliverance from purgatory by his masses and penances. He tried to mount the Scala Sancta (Pilate's staircase, miraculously transported from Jerusalem) on his knees, and yet (strange evidence of the conflict raging in his

The nature of the mission is not exactly ascertained. It is supposed to have been partly connected with the interests of his order, and partly in fulfilment of a vow.

heart), as he essayed the painful task, a voice of thunder kept shouting to him, "The just shall live by faith!"

A further and last step of academical honour awaited him on his return. He was created a Doctor in the Holy Scriptures in the year 1512; and the oath which, on this occasion, he solemnly swore on the Bible, to study and preach it all his life, and maintain the Christian faith against all heretics, is said to have been often afterwards a source of comfort to him in the great crises of his work.

And now our reformer's education was nearly complete, while everything was preparing for the approaching struggle. Some visits of inspection which he made in the place of Staupitz to the Augustine convents, served still more to awaken his feeling of the need of reform, and to call forth his activity and practical abilities. "The whole ground," he complained, "was covered, nay, heaped up, with the rubbish of all manner of strange doctrines and superstitions, so that the word of truth can barely shine through; nay, in many places not a ray of it is visible." The train of conviction was thus fully laid; the impulse and power of reform were fully prepared. It only required a spark to kindle the train-some special excitement to call forth the energy still slumbering, but all ready and furnished for the struggle. Could Rome only have penetrated beneath the surface at this moment, and seen what a deep tremor and current agitated the German mindhow light had begun to peer through unnumbered chinks of the old sacerdotal edifice, revealing not only its weak defences, but the vile and unclean things

within-how warily would she have acted! But the blindness of decay had struck her-falsehood had eaten away her judgment, as well as undermined her strength, and foolishly, nay madly, she went staggering on to her overthrow.

The system of indulgences was a natural growth out of the general system of penance; it rested on the same fundamental falsehood. So soon as the purely spiritual character of repentance became obscured, and the idea of sin as an outward accident within the control of the Church, rather than an inward and spiritual fact, began to prevail, there was obviously no limit to the growth of ecclesiastical corruption. If the Church possessed the power of freeing the sinner from the consequences of his sins, it was a mere development of this principle that the Pope, as the head and sum of the Church, should possess this power in an eminent degree; and when attention was once fixed on the mere externals of penance, it was only a fair logical conclusion that these externals could be appointed and regulated by the Pope at pleasure. The steps of the degradation are plainly marked, from the recognition of outward satisfaction as a condition of salvation, to the substitution of mortifications, pilgrimages, &c., as exhausting the demand of the Church, and then, as the moral feeling sank, and the hierarchical spirit rose, to a payment of money in place of actual service of any kind. Once materialise the spiritual truth, and gradually the material accident will become everything, and not only substitute itself in place of that truth, but necessarily pass from one degraded form to another, till it find its last and summary ex